Brit Hume is Chief White House Correspondent for ABC-TV and is coauthor of a
syndicated weekly column on personal computing.
ER: How did you get involved with personal computers?
Hume: The company began to dole them out to reporters about ten years ago.
They were pretty new then and there weren't that many portables around and
everybody was given these Radio Shack portable 100�s. The first year I had
one, I didn't even want it. I gave it to the producer I was working with
covering the Mondale campaign that year so that he could use it. I wasn't
interested in it. I was carrying a portable typewriter and had for years.
Then I watched what he was able to do with it to make our work easier. And
it was so striking to me that it was very obvious that it was the way to go.
ER: Do you think that in addition to making work easier the computer has
changed the nature of either writing or journalism?
Hume: Well, the great thing about using a computer to write and edit is that
it takes the pain out of revising. That was always a terrible chore because
of the need to tear the sheet out of the typewriter or start over or erase
or mark on the text and so on. It was always a nightmare and it made you
resist changing anything; you wrestled with it on the page. Good writing of
course is a function of being willing to set something down and, if you
don't like it, to change it. And of course that task is made ever so much
easier by writing on a word processor, and it also speeds the transmission
of text from one place to another. For my line of work, that has become an
indispensable factor. It means you can work faster and push things a little
later, which is something you are always trying to do.
ER: What was your own educational background?
Hume: I was an English graduate of the University of Virginia, and I later
did a fellowship at the Washington Journalism Center in 1969-which is four
years after I graduated. But I didn't have any background in math or
computer technology or anything. The truth is I don't know the first thing
about the intricacies of writing code or anything of that kind. I basically
learned how to understand the logical elements of a computer system and what
they are doing.
ER: What do you think of the concept of "computer literacy"?
Hume: Well, there has been a widespread conception, I think, that if you
learn how to use a computer you are just naturally going to be better
educated-indeed that you have to be better educated to learn to use a
computer (which I think is not true); and that educational benefits will
flow from the mere use of a computer (which is true only in a narrow sense
in my view). Computers are certainly useful tools of education. CD-ROM
technology has introduced all sorts of ways that learning of a certain kind
can be made more fun and perhaps more accessible. But that does not add up
to the same thing as computer literacy equating to real literacy. And I
think there are a great many young people around the country who have
mastered their computer system but who have nowhere near mastered the basics
of the English language and who are nowhere near educated. Learning to use a
computer and being good at it are no substitutes for the educational
disciplines that have always been considered primary and that remain so. I
recently received an e-mail message from a student at a quite prestigious
university, whose writing was appalling and whose understanding of how the
world works-and how the White House works-was astounding and distressing.
ER: Speaking of the White House in particular and political leaders in
general, do you have any thoughts about the competing information technology
visions of Vice President Gore and House Speaker Gingrich?
Hume: Well, I note that Speaker Gingrich has talked about putting laptop
computers in the hands of poor kids, which I think is a dubious proposition.
Even if it were possible to do that, they might learn to operate a computer,
but I'm not sure it would lead them to the kind of educational discipline
and development that is required. You still have to know your math. You
still have to learn how to speak and write the language well and
effectively. Computers may make it easier to do that but you still have to
do that. And learning to monkey around with a computer is not the same
thing. I think that both Speaker Gingrich and Vice President Gore have more
enthusiasm for the technology than they have knowledge of it. I think that
Gore understands enough about it to recognize that this is an exciting
knowledge frontier, or at least a technological frontier, but based on the
conversations I've had with him it is not clear that he is deeply
knowledgeable. Bill Clinton doesn't use a computer at all, doesn't know how
to.
ER: Have you spent much time on the Internet?
Hume: A little. The Internet is an interesting phenomenon. My sense of it is
that in ten years, or fifteen perhaps, we'll all be saying, "Hey, you
remember the Internet?" And we'll all laugh about it. It reminds me of the
bulletin board world that existed ten years ago. There was tremendous
enthusiasm and excitement among computer buffs about all the things that
were possible in that domain. And of course in those days we were talking
about the early days of CompuServe and some of the same information
services, and there was some of the same enthusiasm expressed there about
educational opportunity and e-mail and all the things you could do. It seems
to me distinctly possible that a number of people, particularly in the
academic world, are getting important work done with help from the Internet,
but it is not at all clear to me that it is a very widespread situation.
There are a couple of things you need to understand, I think, about the
limits of what can be done productively online. For one thing, there are a
lot of predictions that the fact that you can publish things online will
presently lead to the long-awaited paperless society in which magazines and
newspapers, for example, will go by the board in favor of people getting up
in the morning and logging on to their computer and reading the morning
newspaper. I don't feel that day will ever come. If you think about how
people work, how people read-people read the way they have for centuries for
a reason. It is comfortable and natural to read sitting in a chair or even
lying down on a bed with your book or publication in your lap, because your
eyes are cast downward and your body is relaxed, your neck is not stressed,
and it is simply physically comfortable to do it that way.
ER: What are your thoughts about "news on demand"?
Hume: Well, you have that now. If you look at the numbers, CNN, for example,
averages about a 1 rating, and a 1 rating is fewer than a million homes.
When you think of the number of sets in America that have access to cable,
it is in the tens and tens of millions. What this means is that CNN has an
audience at any given moment of fewer than a million. That's not many
people. You have a certain element of the elite in this country and,
particularly, overseas, which has CNN going all the time because it is a
window on the world to them and it is very important for them. It is
important for them in the way that it is important for somebody in the
securities business to have access to online information about stock quotes
going all the time. People like that will take information in any way that
they have to in order to get it, because it is necessary to them. It's the
only way they can get it that fast. CNN provides some of the same thing for
certain people.
But the people who still "consume" news merely as "consumers," and not as
people who need to have it for their work-to whom it is not
mission-critical-still tend to watch evening newscasts in numbers that dwarf
anything that CNN can boast of, and they still tend to read newspapers.
Newspapers are going through a period of adjustment, to be sure, but that
has been going on since I first got into the newspaper business in
1965-because people's work habits change, afternoon newspapers have been
dying out for a long time, and so forth. News on demand is an interesting
phenomenon, and something that we who work in the news business, or we who
require news of a certain kind at any moment, will turn to. But anybody who
is consuming in a more leisurely way, which means most people, will still do
it the old way.
ER: Well, one final question. Who are you going to be covering in the White
House three years from now?
Hume: Well, it's hard to know. People ask me if Bill Clinton can be
reelected, and I say yes, that is possible, because in politics 24 hours can
bring events that make it seem like a lifetime. But if you were designing a
scenario for a President's reelection this would not be it. He faces
tremendous obstacles. And the Republicans have a great opportunity, but
their own nomination picture is so murky at this point in mid-April 1995
that it is hard to see how that is going to shake out. Predictions are
risky. I'll say this, though. Mr. Dole is, I think, endangered by the fact
that the Republican Party has become even more conservative than it used to
be in recent years. And the nominating elements of the party-that is, the
political activists, the people that get out and beat the bushes in the
primaries and form organizational cores and so on, are even more
conservative than the party as a whole. And Mr. Dole has an awful lot on his
record to suggest that he is not a conservative of their stripe. He may make
it, but it won't be easy. The guy with the best conservative credentials
right now, who has also the money that it appears it is going to require to
make the race, is Phil Gramm; and he is relatively unknown and he has a big
hill to climb as well. But I would say he has at least as good a chance as
Dole of winning it and may well win it, and if he does he has a good chance
of being the next President. But it is awfully early.
� 1995 Educom.